No Longer at EaseReflections on Hurricane Katrina

No
longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

— T.S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”

Probably like many others in the
country, I have been captive to the news ever since
hurricane Katrina took aim two weeks ago at my hometown. New
Orleans is “where I’m from”; though we moved to Houston when
I was six, both sides of my family have roots in New Orleans
that go back generations. My oldest son was born there after
I returned — just out of graduate school — to teach English
and creative writing at a black university in the late
sixties. Like anyone who has spent time in New Orleans — who
has had the peculiar experience of walking up, not
down, to the river — I knew what disaster waited if the city
took a direct hit from so fierce a storm and the waters
topped the levees.

I’d had
minor surgery on Friday, and — under orders to do nothing
—spent most of my time watching the hellish images wash
across the television screen: the miles and miles of
devastated coastline, the flooded sections of the city, and
the anarchy at the Convention Center and the Superdome where
the poorest of the poor were left to fend for themselves —
without food, without water, without succor or rites for the
dying and the dead.

We had
house guests Wednesday evening. After dinner we ventured
out for dessert to a restaurant at the mall. Stepping
outside for the first time in five days, it came as almost a
physical shock to see the houses in our neighborhood
standing undamaged and the streets free of toxic water and
storm debris: the storm had become such an all-consuming
reality.

At the
mall we stopped to tour one of Chapel Hill’s stranger
landmarks, a self-styled “gourmet emporium” known as
A Southern Season. And as we meandered through this
seemingly endless collection of esoteric items — whole
aisles devoted exclusively to hot sauces, to green tea, to
Belgian chocolates; display after display of glassware and
fine china, of crudité and paté platters, of rare and
vintage wines — I tried to understand the knot gripping my
stomach.

There was
nothing here I needed. Among the hundreds of
thousands of items, there was not one thing I needed. My
sense of need had undergone a radical leveling triggered by
the images of those who lacked the most basic things we need
for survival.

My wife
Lisa, who is trained as a psychiatric nurse, volunteered 10
days ago for deployment to the Gulf Coast and is stationed,
as of yesterday, at a Red Cross evacuation center in
Natchez, Mississippi, where she will provide grief and
crisis counseling. The tremendous pride I have felt in what
she is doing is accompanied by the regret that I have no
comparably “useful” skill set with on-the-ground
applications.

It has
also come home to me that Lisa’s ability to respond is the
true gift of her time of life. She “no longer has to worry
about raising a family, pleasing a boss, or earning more
money.” From the dividend our generation now enjoys —
all those extra years of life — comes “the chance to
join with others in building a compassionate society, [a
society] where people can think deep thoughts, create
beauty, study nature, teach the young, worship what they
hold sacred, and care for one another” — “the chance
to do great good against great odds” (Theodore Roszak).
“‘Tis a consummation/ Devoutly to be wish'd” and the faith
and hope behind my own work with Second Journey.

I told
Lisa before she left that I knew she would come back
changed. If watching television accounts was enough to
trigger soul-searching and a reassessment of one’s personal
priorities, how much more witnessing the devastation and
human suffering firsthand? I expect a homecoming not unlike
that of T.S. Eliot’s magi who return to their “Kingdoms”
disquieted: “No longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation,/ With an alien people clutching their gods.”
It will be a challenge to keep up with Lisa.

The
scriptural readings this Sunday came from the great story of
the Exodus — how Yahweh's avenging angel, coming as fire and
water, rescued the Hebrews and led them out of the slave
camps of Egypt. In Katrina we have seen another avenging
angel. She has torn aside the veil behind which was hid that
“other America”. She has delivered “the lost and the
forgotten ones” — the anawim to whom Jesus promised
the Kingdom of Heaven and the Earth as their inheritance.
She has delivered them from their ruined city, branded our
hearts with indelible images of their exodus, and scattered
their numbers through every state in this country where it
is hoped they shall be much harder to ignore.

I am
writing this on the fourth anniversary of the terrorist
attack of September 11. I am writing with fervent hope that
we will not again squander the opportunity that a
great national tragedy presents. I have in mind specifically
the way the public conversation after 9/11 was co-opted:

“In those
first weeks, it was as if we had all gone down to our own
Ground Zero, the Ground Zero in our hearts and our souls.
The public conversation expressed the most beautiful values
and behavior in the inspiring examples of the rescue
workers, the world’s support and love for the American
people, and every American’s desire to help, give blood, or
send money. People opened their hearts in so many ways…

“Then after
just a few weeks, when the collective state of shock and
mourning started to show up as an economic downturn,
specifically as a serious fall in retail sales, President
George W. Bush in a televised address called upon Americans
to support the economy by getting back to business, the
business of spending money. Shopping was portrayed as an
expression of patriotism, a way to show the terrorists that
they could not destroy our economy, our consumerism, the
American spirit, or the American way of life.”

The point
of
Lynne Twist’s essay is that a conversation grounded in
sufficiency — a conversation which united us in
mutual support and opened our national conscience to deep
soul searching — became a conversation grounded in
scarcity — a conversation which divided us from our
global neighbors and stoked our fears. “The
you-and-me world vanished, replaced by the you-or-me
world.”

I hope this doesn’t happen again.
I hope the public conversation which could lead to a
thoughtful re-evaluation of national priorities — around
such critical issues as poverty in America, conservation of
our wetlands, our oil dependence, and global warming (to
name a few) — does not again become co-opted.

I hope we
continue “no longer at ease” in our “old dispensation” of
conspicuous consumption…for a long, long time

Photo credit: The
left image in the composite photo
at the top of the essay was taken by Richard Alan Hannon of the
Baton Rouge Advocate and appeared in the September 12,
2005 issue of Newsweek. The caption on the picture
reads: "A Louisiana State Police officer offers an orange to
a dying hurricane refugee outside the Superdome. Soon after
this photo was taken, the woman passed away."